Capital offence

       The big story in 2005 was that eBay had purchased the Internet's biggest telephone company Skype for $2.6 billion; the big question in 2007 was whether eBay would ever figure out what to do with Skype, which was clearly nothing more than an expensive toy for the auction firm, incapable of making big money and with no place to fit into the e-commerce giant; the big answer of 2009 is that eBay is going to pretty much admit it was wrong, and dump 65 percent of Skype on a little-known investor group and recover just over $2 billion of its 2005 purchase price; the only prominent new owner of Skype is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who has rounded up several investment types, including,weirdly, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, although you have to wonder how thrilled Canadian taxpayers are; eBay will retain 35 percent of Skype,which despite its size and global reach still has no public business plan to make much money.
       High technology trade researchers Mobile Entertainment Forum said in a special report that Asia lags well behind the West in regulating and stimulating the mobile entertainment business; Suhail Bhat, MEF policy and initiatives director, told the ZDNet Asia group that Asian regulators have not been able to keep up with the explosive growth of the mobile entertainment industry;while the European Union is drafting policies for mobile services in 2015,Asia is still trying to figure out what rules to apply today.
       In a huge, unbelievable shock surprise, the European Commission, which has not collected much in big-money hush payments for months, is going to "investigate" the pending purchase of Sun Microsystems by the database giant Oracle ; the EC says that the deal is a potential monopoly that could hinder competition in the database market;translation: If Oracle fails to budget a lot of money for the EC in its merger with Sun, the EC will make life intolerable for Larry Ellison's firm. In another shocking development, the very same European Commission said it will just have to oppose the proposed settlement designed to let Google sell digital books over the Internet because, whoops, possible monopoly trouble; strangely, the current near-monopoly on digital book sales over the Internet by amazon.com and its Kindle book readers hasn't bothered the EC at all.
       So, the Associated Press reports that Siebel Systems ' billionaire owner Tom Siebel was attacked by an elephant while he was on safari in the Serengeti last month; it could have been worse for the software mogul; after all, a lot of super-rich software makers are currently being mauled by a Snow Leopard.
       Advanced Technology Investment
       Co of Abu Dhabi paid $1.8 billion to buy the Singapore chip foundry Chartered Semiconductor . In 2002,Samsung of Korea passed Sony of Japan in market value; last week, it neared the valuation of Intel Corp of America,and is expected to get to $110 billion and pass the US company within months.
       The high profile head of Google in China quit the search engine company to start up a venture fund to finance high-technology start-ups in China; Lee Kai-fu became Google's global president for vice, stationed in Beijing, in 2005;while he revelled in the spotlight of his job, his accomplishments are another matter; under his supervision, Google came under huge fire worldwide for kow-towing to the Beijing authorities on Internet censorship, while in the meantime, Number 2 Google actually lost market share to Baidu , the runaway search leader in China; his new company,Innovation Works , will start looking for investments with $115 million in funding.
       It's not those darned kids, its you;according to technology analysts comScore , just 11 percent of Twitter users are between 12 and 17; your embrace of this weird communication system shatters the belief that it's always the young people who lead the way to pop innovations.
       Britain's worst polluter: Well, the contest isn't over, but the current top candidate is the $50 million supercomputer at the Meteorological Department; according to press reports, the computer takes 1.2 Megawatts of energy to run 15 million MB of RAM and 1 trillion calculations a second for 400 scientists;all of that produces some weather forecasting material and 8,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
       Vicki Walker of NEW ZEALAND was fired FROM HER JOB for annoying coworkers by sending them her imperious email IN ALL CAPS DEMANDING THEY "FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECKLIST";unfortunately, the touchy-feelie New Zealand Employment Relations Au-thority fell for her heart-breaking story of how she had gone into debt, and they ordered that she be re-hired and paid $17,000 in lost wages and unspecified "harm"; her co-workers got nothing for having to put up with her back then and now again.